1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data storage system, and particularly, relates to a data storage system where data processing required for data transmitted/received from/by data transmitting/receiving nodes belonging to the system or for data dealt in the transmitting/receiving nodes are conducted by a relaying node, which is positioned between the data transmitting/receiving nodes and a network.
2) Related Art Statement
According to the rapid spread of networks, many companies have started to attend to EC (Electronic Commerce) or EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). EC is a general term for all or a part of commercial transactions conducted on a network, and EDI means a system where commercial transactions, such as ordering/accepting and estimating, are conducted on a network.
However, data transmitting/receiving, which is conventionally conducted in EC or EDI, has problems mentioned below.
First, in EC or EDI, an exclusive data format is used for each trade circle; therefore, if the data format used in a company attending EC or EDI is different from the commonly used exclusive one, the company is required to change its data format to the exclusive format whenever sending/receiving data to/from EC or EDI.
In addition, in a conventional system, it is difficult to exchange data between companies belonging to different trade circles. That is to say, when a company wishes to transfer data to another company, which belongs to a different trade circle, it is required that the data transmitting company changes the data format so as to suit that used by the data receiving company; or both the data transmitting company and the data receiving company previously have an arrangement about the data format and change the data format in accordance with the arrangement; or the data receiving company converts the data format of the transmitted data into a readable data format. For this reason, the network business, particularly, EDI business is apt to be closed and limited to one trade circle only.
Second, in case that a great amount of data is transmitted to a number of companies in EC or EDI, it is troublesome for the data transmitting company to separately summarize and sum up the data in a condition required by each data receiving company.
Third, when a computer system is renewed in a company under the condition that a great deal of data is stored in the company, many steps are necessary to transfer the data stored in the old computer system into the new system and it is hard to transfer the data smoothly from the old system to the new system. Therefore, the data stored in the old system is hardly used in the new system.
The present invention has been created to solve the above-mentioned problems and has for its purpose to provide a data storage system where a data process center is provided between a network and data sending/receiving companies, so that data is transferred/received to/from the companies via the data processing center. According to the invention, since the difficult processes, such as data format conversion, data summarizing, totaling, and data storing, which has conventionally conducted by the companies themselves attending to EC or EDI, is achieved in the data processing center, the burden for processing data in the companies can be reduced.